Salman Rushdie's provocative novel, Midnight's Children and the Internet. Rushdie's fictional devices for talking about the society of India bear a strong affinity to descriptions of the Internet.

Although we will occupy ourselves only briefly with Rushdie's novel, it will help us show how the Internet reveals important aspects of society and democracy.

It is ironic that we can use the Internet to inform us about the democracy of the very societies that gave birth to this information and communication technology - that we can use the virtual or artificial as a model for understanding, and perhaps improving, the actual.